Individuals and organizations are rapidly accumulating large collections of digital image content, including still images, text, graphics, animated graphics, and full-motion video images. This content may be presented individually or combined in a wide variety of different forms, including documents, catalogs, presentations, still photographs, commercial videos, home movies, and metadata describing one or more associated digital content files. As these collections grow in number and diversity, individuals and organizations increasingly will require systems and methods for organizing and presenting the digital content in their collections. To meet this need, a variety of different systems and methods for organizing and presenting digital image content have been proposed.
For example, there are several digital image collage generation systems that enable users to create digital photo albums manually. These systems typically provide tools for organizing a collection of images and laying out these images on one or more pages. Among the common types of tools for manually creating a digital photo album are tools for selecting a subset of images in the collection that will appear on a page of an album, a graphical user interface for manually rearranging the images on the page, and basic image editing tools for modifying various characteristics, such as size and orientation, of the images that will appear in the album. Users typically find the process of generating a digital photo album using fully manual digital image albuming systems to be tedious and time consuming.
Some automated digital image collage generation systems allow users to organize digital images into album pages in accordance with dates and times specified in the metadata associated with the images. These systems also typically allow users to annotate the images appearing in the digital photo album pages. Some automated digital image albuming systems provide various predefined layout templates that a user may select to create a digital photo album. In these systems, the user assigns images from the collection to various predefined image locations on a selected layout template, and the system automatically adjusts the size, placement, rotation, and framing of the images in accordance with parameters specified for the various predefined image locations on the selected template. Other digital image collage generation systems are designed to produce album pages automatically with minimal input from the user.
What are needed are improved systems and methods of generating image collages.